Media Coverage
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Fewer teens are applying for California’s nonbinary driver’s licenses
Phillip Hammack, a psychology professor and director of the Sexual & Gender Diversity Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz(opens in new tab), said these policy shifts may explain the decline in nonbinary identification among California teens.
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Fog is a vital water resource. Could it disappear in a warming world?
For millions living in the most populous U.S. state, the fog spawned where a cold ocean meets a Sun-warmed coast is like “natural air conditioning,” says Peter Weiss-Penzias, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz.
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Climate change is outpacing evolution. Scientists are using DNA to catch up
“It can be helpful, but it’s not a solution unto itself,” said Karen Holl, a distinguished professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “What should be prioritized is reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
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Bay Area coastal preserve to reopen after bird flu kills dozens of elephant seals
By March 20, Año Nuevo Reserve Director Patrick Robinson said the estimated total number elephant seal deaths from HPAI on the mainland beaches reached about 50, plus another 45 to 50 on Año Nuevo Island, situated a half mile offshore. At that time, UC Santa Cruz researchers were finding an average of two newly dead…
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Why the Most Powerful Computer of 2026 Might Be Made of Living Cells, Not Microchips
The researchers, led by Baskin School of Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. student Ash Robbins, ECE Professor Mircea Teodorescu, and Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering David Haussler, demonstrated their findings in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports.
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It’s America’s most famous bean club. Now it’s sending cease-and-desist letters to others
“These small farms always need new avenues of sales, because the basic problem that’s from time immemorial is that farmers plant, not knowing what their market will be,” said Julie Guthman, a UC Santa Cruz social sciences professor emerita who writes about the politics of food and agriculture.
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AI models will secretly scheme to protect other AI models from being shut down, researchers find
This tendency—which had not previously been documented and which researchers call “peer preservation”—was discovered in research from computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz and published online earlier this week.
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Some black holes are ‘forbidden,’ ripples in spacetime reveal
“What they’re seeing is pretty much in line with what we predicted,” says Stanford Woosley, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) who predicted roughly the observed mass range in the early 2000s using theoretical models. “I’m personally very gratified to see it.”
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Group seeking buffer zone for pesticides around schools
Joji Muramoto, a UC Santa Cruz associate professor who specializes in organic agriculture, said that it now accounts for 14% of the county’s strawberry crop, a sizable increase from the 1980s, at the dawn of the commercial organic agriculture movement. “Nobody believed organic strawberries possible in the 1980s,” he said.
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Stashing CO₂ in the sea
The ocean is already one of humanity’s biggest climate allies: It has absorbed more than 90 percent of excess heat generated by global warming. It is a gargantuan carbon sink, storing a third of all carbon emitted by humans since the Industrial Revolution and, overall, 42 times more carbon than the atmosphere does. “Why not…
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Strawberry Fields Forever: How the Ecology Center turns strawberry season into a teaching moment
Influenced by his mentor, Steve Gliessman — who founded the UC Santa Cruz agroecology program in 1980 — Marks has developed berries grown without the use of toxic sprays or industrial inputs. The process involves careful planning, like planting nutrient-rich cover crops a year before and spreading compost to cultivate healthy soil and long-term sustainability.…
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The Real Problem Behind Grade Inflation
Jody Greene, a former associate campus provost for academic success at the University of California at Santa Cruz, argues that colleges have in fact made a “great effort” to provide support to help students move through the curriculum successfully.